The SANS institute is warning of an increase in reports of malware scanning for vulnerabilities. Currently these samples of malware are undetected by current antivirus signatures. They’re requesting samples of the malware for analysis. The last such surge in scanning was about a week ago when they noted a spike in scans to port 1026. It turned out that was advance recognition of the dasher worm trying to circulate.
OK – the last couple of entries got into some heavy lifting and some real learning on your part. Learning about what software needs to run, what services are running, updating them to keep current on security patches. We even talked about securing services listening for outside connections and limiting them to what is absolutely necessary. Now we’ll take a deep breath and get into another area… Wireless network security.
It’s not often that I get to talk about some of my hobbies on this site. The Genealogy sites are reserved for one of those hobbies, but time certainly takes it’s toll and frankly it’s hard to have much time for my hobbies these days. One of those that I’ve developed in the last few years is shortwave radio listening. I’ve mentioned a software program that can help you use nternet resources to find programming to tune in to (or figure out what you heard.) I’ve talked about my favorite radio (the Sony ICF-SW7600GR).
Ok, it’s BHOdemon time… installed from cd and on starting:
BHOdemon bhotb-all.html not found, no web connection downloading on other machine.
Finally get it to work copying from another machine. But I had to change the Windows ME to show full filenames to help troubleshoot why it couldn’t find the file (naming problem.) (There seems to be a strange display problem on setting “don’t hide file extensions” menu, (I can’t see the check boxes or the checkmarks…. I managed to toggle them “blind” to show file extensions)…
Well, where are things? The gui installer did a good job, got the system up and running. The biggest initial problem is that it didn’t change the default boot entry in lilo, which meant the system tried to boot under the old kernel and things died (likely c++ incompatibilities?) So, on a REBOOT, I chose linux which I assumed pointed to the new kernel and everything went fine, booted to the gui login. The network upgrade took a while (several hours) to pull in 1400 or so packages.
This one is going to be tougher. Of what we’ve looked at so far this will probably take more work and learning than any of the others. The good news is, depending on your situation you may need to do less here. IF you have decided that your pc (or network) has ports open to the outside world, so that incoming connections can be listened for. You NEED to do this. For every service that is accessible from the outside world…
For many years I’d been curious about shortwave radio. Finally maybe five years ago, I broke down and bought a cheap ($30) shortwave radio to see what I could hear. It was ok. Probably among the best AM reception I had out of a radio, but it had analog tuning and a small dial, the switch to switch between shortwave bands was kind of tough to get “just right” and it seemed like I never found the same thing twice.
OK, we’re moving on to BHOdemon to take care of the browser helper objects. Unfortunately it looks like BHODemon is not being currently maintained, the developer has had a housefire.
I am very sorry, but BHODemon is currently on hiatus, as I no longer have the time to devote to it (due to a house fire). You will not be able to download updates or upload reports, and I will no longer be answering emails. At some point, BHODemon may return. I would like to thank everyone for their support over the years.
There are acouple situations where my systems memory needs have exceeded the supply. The most likely cases are running virtual machines and building cd/dvd images. Those things realistically take LOT’s of memory. I have a swap partition – I don’t recall the size right off. I have about 512 MB on the desktop and probably for what I do could use to double that. Swap space, of course, is what the operating system uses when all the physical memory (RAM) is used.
OK, the urpmi upgrade did not go very well. I got into an unworkable corner with URPMI (segmentation fault on running urpmi). Rather than try to troubleshoot or do anything fancy I’m going to move on to the boot cd and do an ftp install from that. It looked as though things went relatively well up until the restart of urpmi and segmentation fault. The first part of a urpmi upgrade usually upgrades urpmi (and it’s dependencies) itself. Then a restart of urpmi happens and it churns on to the next stage.
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